Picture Perfect

Thursday

Mar 28, 2013 at 9:00 AM

Photographer Gregory Crewdson was a Brooklyn kid whose family spent the summers in the Berkshires. The small towns had a profound effect on the city kid. He perceived pain and longing in the residents, who wore expressions on their creased faces that seemed as haunted as the shuttered mills and abandoned farmhouses. When he decided to stage elaborate tableaux to capture on camera, Crewdson returned to the havens of his youth and through his lens transformed them into darker versions of Norman Rockwell’s Stockbridge.

Photographer Gregory Crewdson was a Brooklyn kid whose family spent the summers in the Berkshires. The small towns had a profound effect on the city kid. He perceived pain and longing in the residents, who wore expressions on their creased faces that seemed as haunted as the shuttered mills and abandoned farmhouses. When he decided to stage elaborate tableaux to capture on camera, Crewdson returned to the havens of his youth and through his lens transformed them into darker versions of Norman Rockwell&rsquo;s Stockbridge.

&ldquo;Gregory Crewdson: Brief Encounters,&rdquo; a documentary shot by Ben Shapiro over the course of 10 years, reveals the mad genius at work on his &ldquo;Beneath the Roses&rdquo; photo series taken in Pittsfield and Lee, Mass. Crewdson&rsquo;s images are masterful; many of them reminiscent of an Edward Hopper painting in the ways lonely, isolated people trapped in darkness (physical and existential) can be illuminated in a small island of light.

They&rsquo;re also a lot of work. Shapiro takes us deep into Crewdson&rsquo;s painstaking process of framing the perfect shot, which often involves dozens of crew members, storyboarded scenes, sets constructed inside sound stages, street closings and an intrusive obsession with freezing a moment that can try the patience of the locals. Crewdson employs the vernacular of cinema &mdash; insisting a bathroom in his photo resemble the bathroom from &ldquo;Psycho&rsquo;s&rdquo; Bates Motel for instance &mdash; which makes sense since his photo sessions are the equivalent of intense, compacted feature film shoots. He notes that his earliest inspiration was David Lynch&rsquo;s &ldquo;Blue Velvet,&rdquo; which bent and warped the idea of an idyllic small town into something subterranean. Like Lynch, Crewdson fashions dioramas from these quiet country places where people hide their desperate secrets behind lace curtains.

Crewdson himself is a shambling, brilliant mess; a Fraggle Rock character toting a camera. He&rsquo;s 50 pounds beyond his prime, yet the every-man look works for him. When he&rsquo;s chatting with the local picker who carts his life&rsquo;s belongings along Pittsfield&rsquo;s roads, Crewdson seems more like a neighbor than an outsider. And man, is he good at convincing people to do his bidding when it comes to posing. To use an old line, Gregory Crewdson could talk a pit bull off a meat wagon.

Crewdson&rsquo;s portraits capture the stillness of a moment, yet tell a thousand stories in the details. A mother lies asleep while her young daughter watches over her; a lone woman sits on a curb outside a bar at twilight; a man passes by a movie theater just after a snowstorm while the warm light spilling from the lobby beckons him inside. Shapiro shows us how all these images were conjured, composed and executed, and it&rsquo;s fascinating to watch the exertion of pulling this off.

That said, I was a little surprised to see Crewdson&rsquo;s liberal use of Photoshop techniques to tweak his images. I&rsquo;m no prude about this stuff and I understand the value of digital manipulation. Still, I&rsquo;m curious what other photographers might think about Crewdson erasing an exterior light from a house when he found it distracting, or substituting an image of a sleeping baby from one frame into another because he preferred the child&rsquo;s positioning in the earlier shot.

Clearly the guy is making popular art. His prints fetch in the six figures, allowing him to afford his crews and equipment. But the real worth of his photographs lies in the fact that you want to know what&rsquo;s happened to the people who populate them.

&quot;Gregory Crewdson: Brief Encounters&quot; will be shown at 7:30 p.m. Thursday and Saturday, and at 1 and 2:35 p.m. Sunday in the Jefferson Academic Center at Clark University. The film is part of the Cinema 320 series.